Just when you thought fancy effects on Linux desktops started to get remotely understandable, focussing on Aiglx/Xgl with Compiz, a fork of Compiz is announced: Beryl. This is the logical continuation of the popular compiz-quinnstorm branch, used by many Ubuntu users. "During this summer, and during the last few weeks, some major additions were done in compiz-quinnstorm, bringing a whole new decorator, cgwd, which was designed to be fully themable, and a new settings backend, csm, which intended to drop most of the gnome deps - there were other reasons for this, but this is not our current subject. Consequently, we reached a situation where it's quite impossible to come back." The main reason is general unwillingness to work with and unresponsiveness to the developers of the -quinnstorm branch from the official Compiz guys.

That lack of gconf dependency is a good thing, but why not keep it for GNOME users? An alternative KDE configuration plugin has always been on the TODO list.

Besides, if gconf-editor isn't meant as a config utility, why wouldn't they seperate the config into something less agnostic that could have a proper config utility written around it?

You can just as well write a proper configuration utility using the gconf settings. In fact, that's the whole point. Gconf is not about the UI but about management (lockdown for example) and easier development. gconf-editor is just a convenience tool for developers and geeks who want to access the settings database directly.